NASA Reveals Information About Asteroid Hitting Earth!

CNN reports that an asteroid feared to be on a collision course with our planet no longer poses a threat, according to NASA.

Uncertainties about the orbit of the asteroid, known as 2011 AG5,
previously allowed for a less than a 1% chance it would hit the Earth in
February 2040.

NASA put out a call for
more observation on the asteroid that was aimed right for Earth. Astronomers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa
took up the task and managed to observe the asteroid over several days
in October.

“An analysis of the new data conducted by NASA’s Near-Earth Object
Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California,
shows that the risk of collision in 2040 has been eliminated,”

NASA
declared Friday.

The new observations, made with the Gemini 8-meter telescope in Mauna
Kea, Hawaii, reduce the orbit uncertainties by more than a factor of
60. That means the Earth’s position in February 2040 is not in range of
the asteroid’s possible future paths.

The asteroid, which is 140 meters (460 feet) in diameter, will get no
closer to Earth than 890,000 kilometers (553,000 miles), or more than
twice the distance to the moon, NASA said.

A collision with Earth would have released about 100 megatons of
energy, several thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs that
ended World War II, according to the Gemini Observatory.
Observing the asteroid wasn’t easy, said David Tholen, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy.

The asteroid’s position was very close to the sun, so astronomers had
to observe it when the sky was dark. Tholen told CNN there was about a
half-hour between when the asteroid got high enough in the sky for the
telescope to point at it and before the sky became too light to observe
it.

Because the astronomers were looking at the asteroid low in the sky,
they were viewing it through a lot of atmosphere, which scattered some
of the light and made the object fainter, he said.

“The second effect is the turbulence of the atmosphere makes things
fainter,”

Tholen said.

“We had to keep trying over and over until we got
one of those nights when the atmosphere was calm.”

Tholen and the team also discovered the asteroid is elongated, so
that as it rotates, its brightness changes. That was another challenge
for the astronomers: Because they didn’t know the asteroid’s rotation
period, they didn’t know when it would wax and wane, and when it would
grow too faint to see.

“This object was changing its brightness by a factor of three or four
— it was just enormously variable,”